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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

First of all, keep in mind of all those poor trees. Don't burn paper! It's a waste of energy!

Now, there are a couple of quick thoughts coming in mind after reading your post:

* Composing isn't something one does in a matter of a couple of hours. Some works may require weeks, months or even years to be completed. Yes, sure there were some gods amongst men in classical music history who happened to compose in a snap of their fingers, but at the same time, other monstrosities of the classical music world (Beethoven for example) took their time! So don't think for a second that composing is something that can come and pass without hussle, pressure, or severe inner pain (<- or something anyways).

* You mention names like Kissin and Argerich and I'm assuming that you do the same with composers. Let me put it this way: NOBODY in this forum is as good as these people. End of story. Get over it, relax cause you're the 99.9999% of the musicians and carry on being the best musician you can. We get all this incoming information from these amazing people and think that we should be like them, yet we don't: There are many other ways to be a musician and even if we don't end up having a career like they did, it's still alright. We can be perfectly happy with what we've got and what we've done!

At least this is how I think, otherwise I'd be comparing myself to Ligeti or Prokofiev of Messiaen and that would be unfair to my own self!

Well, one way to look at it is that music is always developing and you could say that a music piece is never really "finished" or "perfect" or "done". It's just an interpretation, a version.So, if you look at it from that perspective, some of the pressure goes away. Be free.

Tchaikovsky felt the same thing a LOT of times and he did OK, didn't he?

Anyway, except for some egomaniacs or those with no self-criticism, we all have those same feelings. So if it's not right or you don't like it, find the point where you feel it goes wrong and then start from there, ignoring what else you've written after that. I hate doing it, but I sometimes do. It's also not uncommon for some composers to get so self-critical they get creatively paralyzed for a while. Rachmaninov is a case in point.

And I can't tell you how many pieces I have that get a page or so in length and then never get finished. I'm getting a little better at that, but I'll never be happy with 100% of what I write!

You've gotten some good responses. I'm not particularly interested in your training, process or how many pieces you've finished. I find myself more in agreement with Scott. There are lots of "composers" here who post some simple little ditty and they're disappointed when we don't Oooh and Ahhh over these modest creative utterances. The start of really good composition is being your own worst critic. You seem to have that covered.

Rather than playing your pieces and being disappointed play them to find their weaknesses and then make them better. the do the same thing (rinse, wash, repeat). For me the process of composing is a lot like sucking a golf ball through a hose. It's an arduous process of self criticism. A little 2 page piano piece usually takes a few weeks to complete (though to be honest I won't spend hours if I don't think I'm getting good results). From my perspective for you to expect to create an amazing piece in just a few hours is laughable. In my experience the time investment to come up with something that's at least pretty good is orders of magnitude greater.

I'll also add that some of my best ideas have come to me when I wasn't trying to compose anything. The real tragedy here is that you burned it, now you can't go back and make it better. I keep all my sketches so I can go back and look through them for ideas down the road. That unruly pile has proven a gold mine in the past.

Ditch the inner critic. He/she is too powerful at the moment. What you are feeling and doing is average, and is what shuts down many an aspiring composer or songwriter.

Keep writing, keep recording. Go back after a month, a year, two years, listen back and then decide if that was any good.

Play it for audiences, they will tell you too, though audience response can be all over the map. However, if the audience likes or loves it, odds are that you are making some decent music.

Lots of great music is and has been created quickly. The caveat is that most of those doing that write twenty or a hundred not so great pieces before the greatness comes out.

I like to point to Bach. Most of Bach's works were cranked out very quickly. His job was to create 25 minutes of "new" music every week, have it hand copied with primitive ink quills, rehearsed and ready to perform. Every week.

I know some don't admire Bach, but that is a matter of taste. Others consider him one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time because of his earlyness, because of his influence on so many of the greats that followed him. Bach was not considered a genius by his contemporaries, most saw him as school master, a music teacher, a church musician. Only when Mozart and others took to studying Bach's work that it was recognized and elevated.

Sameness kills creativity. Move into new keys, don't stay in C major all the time for instance, but move to G! This helps me to see the same chords differently and hear them differently as well, and will help you have ideas that would never have come otherwise!

You may need to try different methods as well. Work on another piano. Use scoring software to help you. Write a different style! Don't limit yourself as I have in the past, making youself choke out ideas that simply don't sound like you want!

When you compose matters too. Never compose if you're in a irritable mood or just not feeling it that day. If you do, your music will suffer.

All I'm saying is play around on the keyboard and have some fun. When you start enjoying composition and don't make it a chore, better ideas will reveal themselves.

music-P, as someone who has been writing music for only about a year, I have learned never to scrap a piece just because I didn't like it. Often, I come back to earlier pieces that I didn't like before and take the bits I like and put them into new ones. Perhaps, as your skills improve over time, you will come back to the theme of that piece and give it a makeover. Also, it's good to keep old compositions around to track you improvement.